It’s official: The CW’s entertainment president since its inception, Dawn Ostroff, will step down next month and will be replaced by former ABC Studios chief Mark Pedowitz, who helped develop hits like Lost, Desperate Housewives, Grey’s Anatomy, Ugly Betty, Scrubs, Army Wives, Ghost Whisperer and Criminal Minds.

The CW launched five years ago after The WB and UPN merged and has struggled to gain ratings traction at a time when broadcast in general has slipped. Though shows like Gossip Girl and The Vampire Diaries have broken through, most of the network’s top draws are aging hits that The CW inherited — like Smallville, One Tree Hill and America’s Next Top Model. Meanwhile, cable rivals going after the network’s young female viewers, like MTV and ABC Family, have proven formidable competitors, with shows like Secret Life of the American Teenager, Jersey Shore, and Teen Mom pulling serious numbers.

The network has seemed to have a tough time figuring itself out — is it the female soap network? The supernatural genre network? And then there’s Top Model, its only reality hit. Its target demo clearly loves reality shows — just look at MTV — but the network has never found another show that it was able to successfully pair with Top Model on Wednesday nights.

Next fall’s crop of CW pilots are already being shot, so turning around The CW might take awhile, even if Pedowitz hits the ground running…

The gorgeous singer-songwriter shares the experiences that shaped her upcoming album… which is going to be amazing.

Kate Voegele‘s third studio album, Gravity Happens, has been a work-in-progress for just about a year now, and the One Tree Hill star can’t wait for fans to get a taste of her new sound. “A lot of things changed in my life this year,” Kate tells HollywoodLife.com exclusively, one of which was her permanent move from Ohio to Los Angeles. “The music is definitely along the same lines of what I’ve done before, but it’s a little more raw and honest and rough around the edges.”

I had the pleasure of seeing Kate perform some of her new tracks live April 25 at the Loews Regency Hotel in NYC — and trust me, you’re going to love Gravity Happens. Between songs like “Sand Castles,” which echoes the frustration young adults face as they abandon their child-like views, to the absolutely beautiful title track, fans will really feel the emotional upheaval of Kate’s experiences over the past year.

And there are many.

One of those experiences was a trip to Nicaragua, where she spent time with families living in a trash dump community. “I don’t speak any Spanish, but the whole thing really rocked me,” she says. “It was all these people who literally live off the trash. It’s pretty intense to see little kids going through a garbage looking for meat for their families — but they were still so happy. It was a whole different level of things I’ve never seen.”

And here’s some good news for Tree Hill fans: Not only will Mia will be back for the May 18 season finale, but she’ll also be performing one of her new songs, “Heart in Chains!”

“Fans will see Mia’s life has changed for the better,” Kate tells us. “She left because her priorities were out of whack, she wasn’t focusing on her music, and she was tired of fighting with Alex. … She and Alex are cool now.”

The show hasn’t been picked up for the fall 2011 season yet. Do you think it deserves a last-minute renewal?

Many CW viewers breathed a sigh of relief April 26 when the network announced the renewal of five hit series — but the news wasn’t quite as hopeful for One Tree Hill fans, whose favorite show remains very much on the bubble. As a longtime fan myself, I have to say I’d be pretty bummed if these next three episodes also turn out to be the last. I’m not ready to say goodbye to the group of madcap southerners who taught me so much about life. And actually made me care about basketball.

1. The cast wants to do it.

It’s not every day you get actors wanting to stick with a series into its ninth year, which I think is a true testament to what a great show One Tree Hill is, and how much the cast enjoys working together. Sophia Bush, Bethany Joy Galeotti, Austin Nichols, Robert Buckley, Stephen Colletti and Lisa Goldstein have all signed on for a potential ninth season, with James Lafferty reportedly interested in returning at least part-time.

2. The fans deserve a ‘final season.’

Much like Smallville fans have been savoring every second of the show’s admitted “final season,” One Tree Hill fans deserve the same experience. There are a ton of story lines to wrap up, and unless the writers know ahead of time that the series is ending, there will be a ton of loose ends left… well, loose.

3. The characters’ stories aren’t finished!

The denizens of Tree Hill, N.C., have been through a lot over the past eight years. We’ve watched them long for their dreams, achieve their dreams, and ultimately… lose their dreams. Do we seriously want the series to end on such a low note? Let’s see Nathan’s back heal enough for him to shoot some hoops again. Let’s see Brooke regain her clothing empire (which it looks like she’s finally starting to.) Heck, I’m even interested in seeing Mouth (Lee Norris) get back in the newsroom!

4. Lucas & Peyton might actually come back… seriously this time!

While I’m sure the current regulars hate hearing about it, the fans really want to see Lucas (Chad Murray) and Peyton (Hilarie Burton) make one last trip to Tree Hill before the series ends. And Chad recently broke his silence about the possibility, tweeting: “Return to oth? I don’t know. Maybe next season for u guys.”

5. Do you really want Glee‘s Brittany to die so young?

One of my favorite lines ever spoken on Glee — not that there are many — was when sexually-confused cheerleader Brittany (Heather Morris) said she didn’t want to die “before One Tree Hill gets canceled.” Doesn’t she deserve at least a few more precious months on this earth?

Show your support for OTH by signing this petition for a ninth season!

One Tree Hill’s” eighth season wrapped in March, series regulars James Lafferty and Stephen Colletti decided to forgo the typical poolside party destination in favor of a whole different kind of vacation.

Along with Lafferty’s brother, Stuart Lafferty (who die-hard “OTH” fans will recognize from a Season 2 guest appearance) and nature photographer Ian Shive, the costars took a no-frills trip through Florida’s National Parks to explore some of nature’s hidden gems.

They filmed their adventure as a pilot presentation for “Wild Life: A New Generation of Wild.” The fifteen-minute presentation is available online and we’d highly recommend checking it out — you’ll see the four friends meet manatees, navigate alligator-infested rivers, and even visit a sunken statue of Jesus at the bottom of a river in the John Pennekamp State Park.

It’s an idea that they’ve been kicking around for quite a while.

“James and I and his little brother Stuart had always wanted to put together a travel documentary, and we were actually pitching it around a couple years ago,” Colletti tells Zap2it. “We wanted to do a European travel vacation show and gear it toward college kids on a budget and a time limit, and find secret spots, hidden gems in Europe that people would want to check out.”

Unfortunately, the execs they met with were interested in taking the show in a different direction that was all too familiar to Colletti, having had his high school personal life aired for the world to see on MTV’s reality drama “Laguna Beach.”

“We found that people were interested in a reality TV aspect that we didn’t want. It was too personal, too much of partying and whatnot,” he says. “They would run with those ideas and it kind of freaked us out. We wanted to feature the surroundings and feature the travels themselves, in a more respectable sense, so it didn’t work out. With work, it kind of fizzled for a while.”

When they began working with Shive, their excitement about the project was reinvigorated. Lafferty tells us that retreating into nature was just what he’d needed after 10 months of working on “One Tree Hill” in Wilmington.